


Sucker Punch (the Matriarch Mashup)

by lunabee34 (Lorraine)



Series: Fistverse [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Families of Choice, Family, M/M, Motherhood, Threesome, Threesome - F/M/M, Unconventional Families, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-29
Updated: 2014-03-29
Packaged: 2018-01-17 10:46:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1384741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lorraine/pseuds/lunabee34
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Order of fics in this series:</p><p>Thelastgoodname's "Five Times Hermione Granger Punched Draco Malfoy" (linked in the notes of my story)<br/>My "Five Times Draco Malfoy Took It in the Face from One H. Granger"<br/>Thelastgoodname's <a href="http://thelastgoodname.livejournal.com/280770.html">Fist Meets Face (the Ron Weasley Remix)</a><br/>My "Sucker Punch (the Matriarch Mashup)"</p><p>In this series, Hermione has a thing for punching Draco in the face.  Eventually, everybody notices.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sucker Punch (the Matriarch Mashup)

_Monica Granger_

Monica Wilkins is secretly jealous of the women in her book club. One of them is a widow, two of them are divorced, one’s being sexually harassed by her boss, and the last lost most of her life savings in a pyramid scheme the year before Monica met her. But every blasted one of them is a mother.

Whenever anyone asks her why she doesn’t have children, Monica first bristles at the inherent rudeness of such questions, and then she says that in the absence of children, she and Wendell have been able to focus all their energy on maintaining their relationship. They’ve been spontaneous. They’ve traveled. They’ve lived for themselves. All these things are true. In fact, lack of parental responsibility is one of the reasons that Monica and Wendell were able to realize their lifelong dream of moving to Australia the instant they had saved enough money to live comfortably here.

And yet, Monica feels strangely bereft when Carol yells at the twins to cut off the music during her turns to host book club, when Phyllis asks the group to help her choose a mother-of-the-groom dress that won’t upstage the mother of the bride’s bronze organza number, when Deidre misses book club two months in a row because her daughter has dance practice Saturday nights and Deidre’s partner is working weekends on a project that will either make or break her career. The night book club discusses _The Handmaid’s Tale_ , Monica excuses herself early and sobs the whole way home because she doesn’t know what babies smell like after a bath and some part of her thinks she ought to. She’s filled with an inexplicable longing that she can’t explain. It’s there in her peripheral vision, always, this phantom child she never gave birth to.

So when a teenage girl shows up on Monica’s doorstep with bushy hair and perfect teeth and what looks like a short riding crop in her hand, Monica feels nothing but relief, gratitude, a sense of rightness in the revelation this girl brings. Those feelings last a long time. Years. They last through a relocation to London, through the worst of Hermione’s PTSD, through a nauseating teleportation via an old shoe to somewhere called the Burrow, and through a wedding in which all the attendants but Monica and Wendell have the capacity to conjure rice out of thin air as Ron and Hermione leave the chapel. Hermione makes certain that someone magics up handfuls for her parents to throw as well. She’s always been a thoughtful child.

Monica’s seemingly limitless capacity to overlook the difficult and weird turns her daughter’s life has taken last right up until the moment Hermione and Ron tumble out of the fireplace and into the breakfast nook with a pinch-faced blond man in tow. The three of them seem a bizarre mixture of nervous, guilty, and defiant. Monica can’t imagine why. The strange man stares at Monica’s kitchen as if he’s never seen such a place before. Maybe he hasn’t. Hermione has told Monica that wizards are sheltered from the outside world to a ridiculous degree.

“Draco’s moving in with us, Mum,” Hermione says over tea and biscuits, as Ron—bless his cotton socks—blushes a dull red across his broad cheeks. The look Draco shoots Ron in response is both disgusted and fond. It’s very similar to the way Hermione usually looks at Ron. Monica doesn’t like this expression on Draco’s face in the least. “Ron and I are trying to save money to buy our own cottage, as you know, and Draco is looking for work right now. This seemed the best solution for us all.”

Monica can’t say why, exactly, but she is suddenly and absolutely certain that Hermione is lying to them or at least not telling the whole truth. The last time her daughter lied, the world almost fell to a genocidal maniac. Monica tries not to panic.

Wendell is oblivious, naturally. He’s a good father, a good husband, a good dentist, but he isn’t particularly perceptive or clever. “That’s wonderful,” Wendell says. “Your mother and I lived with another couple when we first married, and we were able to save quite a bit of money that way.”

 _We lived with your half-wit cousins_ , Monica thinks. _Your mother made us take them in, and you complained about every bloody second of it._ “How nice,” she says aloud and pours them all more tea.

After they leave, Monica locks herself in the bathroom and tries not to hyperventilate. Hermione has always kept Monica and Wendell separate from most of her life. Even as a child, she kept them at arm’s length. Hermione says this silence is for their own safety, to protect them. But Monica thinks it’s more than that. She can’t help but feel that her daughter must believe on some fundamental level that her non-magical, her _Muggle_ , parents are somehow inferior to the witches and wizards that have dominated the entirety of her formative years. Monica realizes she’s finally ready to be angry at Hermione.

Monica says nothing about her feelings to anyone. What can she say? Her daughter is a war hero. She’s killed people. She has starved and frozen in the woods for months chasing down the refracted soul of a madman. What can Monica say that comes anywhere close to touching that? Monica suddenly feels like she did years ago, as if she’s missing the child she never had.

Not long after Draco moves in, Hermione asks Monica to babysit Rose. “Just for a few hours,” she says, her head floating above the coals and licked by flame.

That night a tiny brown owl swoops in through the open bedroom window and drops a package onto Monica’s lap.

“How’s that for a lark?” Wendell says excitedly, putting his book down on the bedside table to watch the owl fly around the room. “We’re supposed to give it a bit of food or something as a treat, I think.” He breaks one of the crisps he insists on eating in bed into pieces, and the owl delicately nips them from his outstretched palm.

Inside the package is a frayed sock that transports Monica to a tidy garden that fronts a snug cottage at precisely 9:00 the next morning. They’re all waiting there for Monica, Ron’s arms full of wriggling baby girl.

Hermione says, “She’s almost ready for her morning nap, aren’t you, Rosie?”

Rose giggles and wraps her little arms around Monica’s neck when Ron hands her off. Then Hermione, Ron, and Draco join hands and Apparate away like ribbons curling in on themselves, like roiling black smoke.

“Let’s go inside and have a look-see, shall we?” Monica says to Rose and opens the door to the cottage.

Draco’s room is immaculate, not a sock on the floor, no book on the nightstand with dog-eared pages. The bed is made with military precision, the sharp edge of a pristine white sheet folded down over a green duvet.

Ron and Hermione’s bed is the largest Monica has ever seen. It dominates the room, this vast expanse of rumpled sheets with three plump pillows in a messy row along the headboard. Monica stands in the doorway with the knuckles of one hand pressed to her mouth until Rose’s cries startle her. She changes Rose’s diaper and feeds her a bottle, and Rose falls asleep in Monica’s arms, her tiny head sheltered in the crook of Monica’s elbow.

Rose has fallen asleep again for her afternoon nap by the time her parents and Draco return. They look very happy, the three of them, comfortable and connected in a way that Monica can’t quite put into words. But Monica’s no fool. She wasn’t born yesterday, no matter what these children standing before her might believe. She went to university in ‘71 after all. Monica’s seen a few things, and she has some idea of what Hermione and Ron are playing at with Draco even if none of them wants to admit it.

Again, Monica says nothing to anyone. Again, what can she say? If Hermione is determined to throw away a perfectly good marriage on a man she’s never once mentioned positively until this year, nothing Monica has to say can stop her. Nothing Monica has to say has ever stopped her daughter from doing exactly what she wants. Monica consoles herself with the possibility that these sorts of arrangements are considered normal in the wizarding world, that perhaps Hermione and Ron are simply following the customs of the world Hermione now inhabits. 

Though it’s cold comfort, that maybe, because it means that once more Hermione has kept her parents separate from what is most important in her life. Once more she has chosen to leave Monica behind. 

_Narcissa Malfoy_

“I should have thrown that Mudlbood in the street the instant she dared strike Draco, and the Ministry be damned,” Narcissa tells her sister’s portrait.

“She should never have stepped foot in the Manor in the first place,” Bellatrix says. “But you never do live up to the strength of your convictions, do you, Cissy? And now our Draco stays on his knees for that blood traitor Weasley and his abomination of a wife.” Bellatrix is screaming now, her hair tangled in a perverse halo around her head, spittle on her chin. “Of us all, you deserved to live the least.”

“Perhaps,” Narcissa says, “but I intend to continue doing so nevertheless.”

Unfortunately, she must now live without the comfort and security of the web of influence Lucius spent long years weaving. Narcissa has her freedom and her son but scant else in her estimation. Lucius rots away in Azkaban because Potter refused to speak for him as he did for Narcissa and Draco. This is a kinder and gentler Azkaban to be sure. Lucius is not being slowly hollowed into nothingness by Dementors. He is allowed to owl his family, even visit with them briefly on a monthly basis, but that part of Narcissa’s life is over. Lucius may as well be dead for all the good he can do her now.

The Malfoy fortune has been reduced to an amount a Weasley might find luxurious but that Narcissa can barely tolerate. Draco is considered virtually unemployable by any entity Narcissa considers worthy of his time and by many of those which she does not. In these reduced circumstances, Narcissa can begin to understand, if not condone, why her son might choose to prostrate himself before two-thirds of the Saviors of the wizarding world.

“What have they given you?” Narcissa asks Draco during their weekly tea.

“I beg your pardon?”

Narcissa refrains from rolling her eyes. Draco knows perfectly well what she is asking. “Weasley and the Mudblood. What have they given you?”

Draco’s jaw works furiously for a long moment, and then he sets his teacup down carefully as if the porcelain is in danger of shattering. “This line of inquiry is beneath you, Mother.”

“Please, Draco. The only one beneath anything in this family is you, and what you have placed yourself beneath is so abhorrent to me that I must believe you have reason to abase yourself in this manner.” Narcissa affects a calm she does not feel and hopes Draco does not notice how she trembles.

“What have they given me?” Draco stands, his hands clenched into fists at his sides. He is magnificent in anger, much as his father was in his youth. Narcissa is caught off guard by a longing for Lucius so sharp that it nearly brings tears to her eyes. “Something you could never understand, Mother. Absolution, the chance to be a better man than I have been, friendship.”

Draco looks as if he intends to go on in this vein for some time, so Narcissa interrupts him. “Let’s not forget the black eyes, dearest.”

“What?” Draco is clearly startled that Narcissa is aware of the Mudblood’s proclivities, but surely the boy realizes that once such a thing happens in the Manor, it cannot be kept secret from her for long. “That’s only Hermione, and it doesn’t mean what you think it means.” Draco sits heavily in his chair, and the teacup rattles at his arm. “Bloody hell.”

“Indeed,” Narcissa says.

Draco says, “Mother, I want this. I want them.” His eyes are huge in his face. He looks like a small boy again, like a child Narcissa could surely protect and also like the man she most certainly did not.

If Narcissa cannot understand why Draco wants a blood traitor and a Muggleborn for his very own, she can recognize the ferocity of his want, and as far back into history as the name reaches, Malfoys have always gotten what they want.

_Molly Weasley_

Molly is proud that she has Muggle friends. She’s spent her whole adult life fighting a Dark Lord who would just as soon have seen the world rid of Muggles entirely; regularly spending time with Hermione’s family feels like another triumph over Voldemort to Molly. Sometimes they all have dinner together, and sometimes Monica takes Molly into London for a day of shopping in the most delightful and curious shops Molly has ever seen, and sometimes Monica and Molly take tea in the Grangers’ garden—and every single time Molly feels as if Voldemort’s legacy of hatred is that much more diminished.

On one such afternoon, Monica’s garden is in full bloom and the air is thick with the smell of beautiful plants flowering. Molly has no time for gardening and a garden full of gnomes to boot, so she’s filled with an amicable envy at the vicious oranges and pinks and reds that color the lawn around her. She’s just about to comment on Monica’s green thumb when Monica pushes away her plate of biscuits and clears her throat.

“Is polyamory common in the wizarding world?” she asks Molly.

“Poly-what, dear?” Molly says.

Monica looks uncomfortable but determined to bravely soldier on. “Polyamory. Relationships composed of multiple partners.”

Molly sighs. “You’ve figured it out then.” She and Arthur both have wondered what Monica and Wendell know, what they suspect about the relationship growing between Ron, Hermione, and Draco.

“Perhaps,” Monica says, “but I’d like to hear your perspective on the situation.”

“This…polyamory, it isn’t common among us, but it isn’t unheard of either.”

The expression on Monica’s face is suddenly heartbroken, but by the time Molly has reached out to take her friend’s hand, Monica has composed herself. “Thank you for telling me,” she says.

“Arthur and I aren’t best pleased ourselves,” Molly says, squeezing Monica’s hand. “He’s a Malfoy after all, and the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree if you ask me. I don’t know what in Merlin’s beard our children think they’re doing, but they didn’t dare ask us, now did they?”

Monica laughs, a strangled sound. “No, they most certainly did not.”

“I never would have imagined Ron and Hermione taking up with a Malfoy. The Malfoys and the Weasleys have always hated each other, and Hermione has a habit of knocking Malfoy flat on his back when his mouth gets too smart. No, Arthur and I never saw this coming.”

“Are you saying that Hermione beats Draco? Habitually?” Monica’s face pales, and her fingers twitch against Molly’s.

“Beats? No. More like punched in the face once or twice.” Molly sees that she’s only upsetting Monica further, so she says, “Best we can tell, they all took up together around a year ago, which is the last time I saw Hermione hit Draco. And I’m positive he deserved it.” 

When Molly leaves, Monica is still deeply disturbed, and some of her friend’s discomfort has transferred to Molly. Monica seems to think that Ron and Hermione might be hurting Draco, punishing him for his part in the war or something equally as sinister. While Molly finds that notion more than ludicrous, she cannot deny that their relationship is troubling. 

That night, Molly’s house is just as she likes it, full of her children. Hermione and Ron seem happy enough with each other, kissing in the garden and holding hands on the settee and laughing at each other’s jokes at the dinner table. Molly begins to relax. Then Ron mentions that Draco has an interview with an apothecary in Diagon Alley in two days time.

The table goes silent.

Then Fleur says, “Draco? Ze one who let Death Eaters into your school? You mean ze one who did zis?” She points to Bill’s face. “Yes, how is he?”

Bill says, “Fleur,” but she ignores him.

“No, no. Let them tell us what ze little Death Eater is doing with ze freedom he does not deserve, ze life he does not deserve.”

Hermione rushes from the table, her eyes full of tears, and Ron follows her after a conflicted look at his family. Once they’re gone, Fleur’s anger seems to abate. She throws her arms around Bill, kisses his ruined face, and asks Ginny to pass the salad, effectively dismissing Ron and Hermione and whatever Draco might be to them both. 

Suddenly, Percy slams the salt shaker down on the table so forcefully that the rolls bounce off their platter and onto the floor. “What sin did Draco Malfoy commit that was any worse than mine?” he says.

For a moment, Molly is so shocked she can barely breathe. The children seem equally surprised, Charlie caught with his fork halfway to his mouth, George choking on a mouthful of butterbeer. Fleur’s mouth forms a perfect round O.

“I didn’t let Death Eaters into Hogwarts, but I let them snake their way into the Ministry. I didn’t kill anyone, but they died around me all the same. I turned my back on my family, on everything I’d ever been taught, everything. And nobody can say Malfoy did that.” Percy’s voice is harsh and ragged and full of the pain Molly wishes she could take from all her children. “If Draco Malfoy can’t be forgiven, how can any of you ever forgive me?”

“It is not ze same!” Fleur cries.

“Like bloody hell it isn’t. It’s the same.” Percy reaches across the table and turns Bill’s face to the side. “I am just as responsible for this as Draco.”

Bill takes Percy’s hand and squeezes it. “I’ll thank you all to leave my face out of whatever argument it is that we’re having. I love you, Percy. You’re my brother. You’re family, and whether we like it or not, looks like Malfoy’s headed that way as well.” 

Arthur clears his throat. “Well said, Bill.”

“I’ll fetch Ron and Hermione,” Molly says, pushing her chair back from the table. “It’s time for dessert.”

Molly finds them in the cornfield, rows and rows of dying stalks stretching out around them in every direction. She cannot believe at times that the hopes of all magical beings rested on these fragile children, on this man and woman who still seem so impossibly young to her. They look up at Molly as if she has the answers, as if she can mend whatever is broken in the world around them.

“Come on, you lot,” she says, taking them by their hands and pulling them up beside her. “I’ve made pie.”


End file.
